Jill DuffySamsung Gear FitThe gorgeous Samsung Gear Fit is part fitness tracker and part smartwatch, but it's mainly an accessory for recent Samsung devices; if you want either an activity tracker or a smartwatch specifically, you can do better.

Not functionally independent; requires a supported Samsung device. Pedometer not enabled by default. Touch screen too sensitive to use while in motion. Requires two apps to use fully. Short battery life.

Bottom Line

The gorgeous Samsung Gear Fit is part fitness tracker and part smartwatch, but it's mainly an accessory for recent Samsung devices; if you want either an activity tracker or a smartwatch specifically, you can do better.

When a new notification arrives, the watch vibrates quickly and the screen illuminates. The touch-screen interface lets you scroll to reader longer messages, if you've enabled this feature. Other notifications include alarms, schedule reminders, missed calls, weather updates, and a lot more. You can pair up notifications from pretty much any app to display on the Gear Fit.

If that sounds like notification overload, in the Gear Fit Manager app, you can check the box for "Limit Notifications," which stops all notifications except those from calls and alarms any time you're actually using the phone. (Why would you want to get them twice?) It puts the "smart" back in "smartphone."

Fitness FeaturesAs mentioned, the fitness features of the Samsung Gear Fit need some ironing out. One huge disappointment, for example, is that the pedometer is not enabled by default. Why oh why is it even an option to turn it off? For a product with "Fit" in its name, I should hope that the step-counter is always and forever doing its job. In the Gear Fit, once you turn on the pedometer, it stays on (phew), but I'm disheartened to say that's not where the confusion ends.

Flip on your Samsung smartphone and open up the S Health app, where you'll see yet another option to enable a pedometer. The phone and app have their own step-counting settings. Why does this overlap exist? If you have a Samsung Gear Fit paired to your S Health app, you shouldn't even see a second option to turn on a pedometer. (The reason: If you don't have a Gear Fit, you see, you can use the phone and app as your pedometer. Tricky.)

Okay, so let's say you turn on both pedometers. If there are conflicting readings, the devices will keep only the bigger number. Great. But there's more. In the Gear Fit, there's yet another function to record "walking" as an activity. You got that right. The pedometer counts your steps, but you can also record a walk separately, or perhaps in addition to your regular step count. The idea is that you can turn on "walking" when you're going for a walk, which allows you to enable a few other features, such as continuous heart rate monitoring, at least for the duration of the activity.

It takes a little time to wrap your mind around all these differences, but the main problem as I see it is you shouldn't have to. With most other activity trackers, the three-axis accelerometer inside detects when you're "going for a walk" versus puttering around the office. When it sees steady motion and an increase in speed, the companion app will show a spike in activity during this time. The Basis Carbon Steel Edition, for example, automatically records activities such as walks and runs. It knows based on your motion. Fitbit devices, meanwhile, don't classify the activity automatically, but you do have the option in the app to manually add the start and stop time of your walk (or run, or other activity).

With the Gear Fit, you have to remember to turn on and off tracking for any of your activities. If you've grown accustomed to the automation with other fitness trackers, as I have, babysitting your device in this way gets old very quickly. And unfortunately, I found that even when doing so, the battery only lasts about three days on a charge—well short of what you get with the average fitness tracker.

Bicycling, running, and hiking. On the touch screen, you'll see an option for Exercise, which is where you can find the "walking" option, as well as options for running, cycling, and hiking. Tap it, and you'll see your most recent summary of the chosen activity: total time, miles, and miles per hour or calories burned (depending on the activity). Next to the summary is a Start button to begin a new round of exercise.

Confusingly, all the extra features around activities, such as goals and that continuous heart rate monitor I mentioned, live behind the summary of your previous walk. It doesn't look like a button, though. You'd never know how to get to those settings unless you accidentally tapped the previous activity summary. Confusing!

The phone—not the Samsung Gear Fit itself—collects data about your mileage and speed, so you'll need to have the phone on hand for more detailed workout summaries. If you workout without a phone, the Gear Fit will still collect basic information, like your total activity time, and sync it back to the app, but it's pretty rudimentary without the phone.

There are some neat coaching features, similar to what you'll find in top-notch running or bicycling apps, such as Runtastic PRO. These features cause the Gear Fit to let you know you when you've hit mile markers, announce your pace, or tell you to speed up based on goals that you've set.

Heart rate. The heart rate monitor built into the underside of the Gear Fit measures the flow of blood through the veins with an optical sensor. In its basic setup, it's very similar to the Basis and MIO Alpha BLE. The Basis, however, takes your heart rate continuously, all day and night, automatically. And the MIO Alpha takes a continuous reading automatically while you're working out (it's a runner's watch, not a general-purpose tracker, so it's not meant to be in active mode all day and night).The key word in both cases is "automatic." With the Samsung Gear Fit, you can take a single heart rate reading by activating the heart rate feature, and you can turn on continuous heart rate data monitoring during an activity, but it doesn't do any of that by default. I'm sure these options are meant to preserve battery life, but they really take a toll the Gear Fit's ease of use and functionality.

I wore the Samsung Gear Fit for about a week while simultaneously wearing a Fitbit Force (yes, it's been recalled, but I'm still wearing one) and a Jawbone UP24. The Force and UP24 showed remarkably similar readings day in and day out. The Samsung Gear Fit was sometimes in line with their readings and sometimes not. Here's an example from one day's total:

Fitbit Force: 10.44 miles (about 22,500 steps)

Jawbone UP24: 10.31 miles (about 21,000 steps)

Samsung Gear Fit: 10.59 miles (about 26,500 steps)

And here's another day:

Fitbit Force: 6.24 miles (about 14,000 steps)

Jawbone UP24: 5.6 miles (about 12,000 steps)

Samsung Gear Fit: 4.13 miles (about 9,000 steps)

For what it's worth, the consensus is that people take, on average, 2,000 steps to walk a mile. I once counted my steps in a mile with a manual click-counter and came out way above average at more than 3,093. Across all my testing, I've found Fitbit's readings to be the most accurate, in part because it doesn't just measure steps, but also tells the mileage equivalent, and that's the number I've found to be the most accurate.

Jill Duffy is a contributing editor, specializing in productivity apps and software, as well as technologies for health and fitness. She writes the weekly Get Organized column, with tips on how to lead a better digital life. Her first book, Get Organized: How to Clean Up Your Messy Digital Life is available for Kindle, iPad, and other digital formats. She is also the creator and author of ProductivityReport.org.
Before joining PCMag.com, she was senior editor at the Association for Computing Machinery, a non-profit membership organization for...
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